The Hungry Ghosts Read online

  By the time my grandmother was twenty-four, she had already amassed many properties, and my grandfather regarded his wife with the befuddled look of someone who had just noticed some object that had been there all along. He was particularly awed by her tantrums, the way she would yell at Sunil Maama for some incompetence, Sunil wringing his hands and gasping, “Sorry, Daya, sorry.” She would also rant at tradesmen who tried to sell her bad goods, and at carpenters or pipe-baases who had done a shoddy job. When she began one of her tirades, my grandfather would creep away to his room. Occasionally, he gently protested at dinner, particularly after she had humiliated Sunil. She would hear him through and then say mildly but firmly (for she was often tranquil after a tirade), “But I am right about this, nah? I am always fair-thinking.”

  He was never able to deny that she had lost her temper for good reason. “But, dearest, is it necessary to be so fierce about it?”

  “Otherwise?” My grandmother would indicate for Rosalind to refill her husband’s plate. “I am, after all, a woman. Men, by their very nature, will always try to take advantage of me. If I am not strong with them, they will rob me. And,” a steeliness would enter her voice, “no one is going to shame me by taking advantage and then laugh behind my back, telling everyone I am some gullible, pathetic fool.”

  This always shut her husband up, and my mother would be aware, in that way of children, that something heavy and unspoken muffled the clink of her parents’ cutlery against their plates.

  When my grandmother passed my mother on the verandah while she was doing her homework, she would sometimes stop to say a few stiff words like, “Ah-ah, very good, doing your school work,” or, “Now, have you eaten properly today?” or, “That uniform is looking a bit worn. Ask Rosalind to take you to Mrs. Deutram’s to get some new ones made.” All this was said in a distant but pleasant tone, as if my mother was a servant’s child or a cousin’s daughter sent to board so she could go to a good Colombo school. And my mother was grateful for this lack of interest. She did not want to be noticed. All the love she needed, she got from Rosalind.

  What my mother remembered most about her father’s funeral was the novelty of my grandmother’s dry hand in hers as they stood watching the coffin slide into the roaring red of the crematorium furnace. The moment the doors closed behind it, my grandmother dropped her daughter’s hand as if unaware she had been holding it and walked away to greet important guests. Among those present, my mother had noticed a group of unknown women, some of them ancient. They were country folk in puffed-sleeve blouses and sarongs that were out of fashion in the city, where Colombo ladies wore the sari. She had thought they were servants because of their clothes, but also because her mother ignored them. Yet soon after these women had appeared at the cremation grounds, Sunil Maama and his wife had touched the older women’s feet as a sign of respect. One of the oldest, who was massive and square, had taken Sunil Maama’s arm for support as they stood watching the smoke whirl from the chimney.

  Rosalind led my mother away to sit on the marble steps of a nearby mausoleum and poured her some iced lime juice from a flask. “Who are those women?” my mother demanded.

  The ayah took her time replacing the lid on the flask. “They are your amma’s aunts and cousins.”

  My mother already knew that her grandparents were dead, but the news that she had other relatives on her mother’s side, not just Sunil Maama, was a shock. She turned to gawk at them, but Rosalind pulled her gently around by the chin. “The old lady who is leaning on Sunil Maama’s arm is his mother. Now drink your lime juice.”

  Back at the house, these relatives were sent to sit in the garden with the peons, lowly clerks and old servants who had come to pay their respects. My mother hid in a nearby araliya tree and watched how they leant over to whisper urgently about this insult, their faces prim with outrage. The older women chewed bulath leaves, their teeth and lips discoloured red, the wad like some living thing scurrying about in their cheeks. They wore elaborately carved circular brass chunam containers, like fob watches, attached to their hips by chains. The women would flip the lids open, scoop the white paste onto a bulath leaf then cram it into their mouths to augment their wads. My mother was intrigued by the dexterity with which they spat out red streams of bulath juice into the garden, never dribbling on their chins or staining their white blouses.

  The women kept their voices to a discreet murmur, except for Sunil Maama’s mother, whom the others addressed as Thushara Nanda, and who seemed to be the matriarch of the clan. She was quite deaf, leaning into the conversation, ear cupped. “Yes-yes,” my mother heard her say in a loud nasal tone, “that is in the past now. Why is Daya still holding a grudge against us? After all, she was the one who got herself into that position, nah? She is the one who made a vesi of herself with that man.” The others tried to hush the old woman, but either because she did not notice or did not care, she continued, “And who had to face the consequence of her lasciviousness? We did. After she went off to live in Colombo High Style, it was our young girls that bore her shame and had difficulty getting proposals.”

  My mother was stunned to hear her own mother, who seemed so indomitable, called a “vesi,” a term she did not understand but knew was the ultimate insult to a woman.

  When these women were ready to leave, my grandmother came out to them. “Ah-ah,” she said with a rictus of a smile, “you are going.”

  Sunil Maama had come along behind her, having been detained earlier by fellow lawyers in the house. He went around now, giving the women envelopes of money while my grandmother stood, clasped hands pressed to navel. The women took the envelopes stonily, but my mother sensed their need. Vindication flickered at the corners of my grandmother’s mouth. Yet once the women had left, her face buckled into an ancient tiredness and sorrow as she gazed after them.

  And so my mother Hema saw for the first time that her mother had weaknesses, too.

  When she was fifteen, my mother sat for the Senior School Certificate. Exam results in those days were published in the papers, with students who had done best at the top of the list, failures at the bottom. My grandmother was vaguely aware that her daughter had sat for the certificate. The day the results were published, my mother rose before dawn to wait with Rosalind for the paper, so she already knew how she had fared when, at breakfast, Rosalind, hand fluttering with excitement, laid the paper in front of her mistress, folded to the results page.

  “But what is this?” my grandmother snapped at the improperly arranged paper. Then, seeing what was on the page, she gave her daughter a keen glance before bending to run her finger along the list from the bottom up.

  “At the top, Loku Nona,” Rosalind cried. “At the very top!”

  My mother had won distinctions in all eight subjects, one of only twelve students to do so island-wide, and one of only two girls. My grandmother stared at her daughter, then turned to Rosalind, who beamed and nodded. My grandmother scratched her cheek as if she did not know what to do with this piece of news. Then she nodded at my mother. “Ah, very good. Yes-yes, very good.”

  The phone soon began to ring: first Sunil Maama and his wife, calling to congratulate my mother; then my mother’s principal, various friends, the mothers of these friends, her father’s relatives. Soon my grandmother was getting phone calls, too, from business associates and bank managers, colleagues of her late husband in the Ministry of Justice. As my grandmother answered the calls, my mother noticed that her tone grew more and more proud and proprietary. Soon she was saying things like, “Yes-yes, I had no doubt she would get eight distinctions. It was no surprise at all. Hema has always been a very bright student.” Or, “She is my daughter, after all, why are you acting so surprised, ah?” Or, “From the time she was a little girl, she was smartsmart.” Or, “Yes, indeed, I have very big plans for her. No marrying at seventeen or anything like that. My daughter is a modern woman.”

  Sitting on the verandah listening, my mother felt strangely deflated.


  A few days later, my grandmother took her daughter to lunch at the Grand Oriental Hotel’s Imperial Room, which overlooked the harbour. She invited Sunil Maama, too, because she felt it was unseemly for women to dine out alone; also, she really did not have anything to say to her daughter. During the meal, she spoke only to Sunil Maama, but gave sidelong glances at my mother, saying, “How wonderful it is for young women these days, nah, Sunil? All the advantages. Why, you can become a doctor or a lawyer now. Who knows? One day a woman might rule the country.”

  Later, when they were alone in the car going home, my grandmother, face averted, slid a royal-blue velvet box across the seat to my mother. It contained a Ceylon Stones jewellery set—a matching necklace, earrings, bracelet, ring and brooch.

  When my mother thanked her hesitantly, my grandmother declared with relief, “Ah, you like it? Well done, duva, well done.” She reached out, hesitated for a moment, then patted my mother’s hand. “Take out the necklace. Try it on.”

  My mother drew out the necklace and rested the cold stones against her clavicles.

  My mother’s success at school had wrapped itself around her shoulders like a gossamer shawl. She had loved her classes, loved the validation from teachers and schoolmates. She had felt a happy lightness, studying in the library after school, the sun slanting in through the window, mynahs chirping outside, a breeze coming to her, smelling of salt from the distant murmuring sea. Then there had been the week before the exams when she, along with other girls hand-picked to succeed and bring prestige to the school, were kept back for afternoon tutoring in the staff room. This was a hallowed place, forbidden to students, and my mother had felt grown up to be invited in. The teachers had treated the girls like equals, with a relaxed merriness. My mother enjoyed how they had turned girlish recalling their own school days, teasing each other and the girls, divulging their college nicknames, letting their hair out of rigid buns to lie in coils about their shoulders. A peon had been sent to get treats such as mango or pineapple achcharu, freshly fried vadais or mutton kotthu roti from the nearby Muslim restaurant. As they sat around spooning the food into their mouths, the girls, grown bold, would ask the teachers about their lives and marvel at who these women had been before they came to work here, at who they were outside the institution. The teachers had painted an irresistible picture of university life, seducing the girls into trying even harder.

  My mother had scored distinctions in the sciences, but also in the arts and humanities. She had not made up her mind which path she wished to pursue for the Higher School Certificate. My grandmother, however, soon decided on sciences in preparation for medical school. She informed my mother of this decision matter-of-factly. Opposition was useless.

  One afternoon, on a day when my mother usually had tennis practice, the family car arrived early at her school and the driver told her she was wanted at home. She came back to find four men lined up in chairs on the verandah, faces twitching with nervousness, my grandmother standing over them, beaming among the sniffles, frayed cuffs, shrunken trouser legs and oil-soaked hair. The tutors were to prepare her daughter for distinctions in physics, chemistry, zoology and botany.

  My mother enjoyed her extracurricular activities and excelled in sports, drama and debating. Now, however, she was expected to come home right after school and spend each afternoon and early evening in the gloomy study, fan swirling the dusty air above while she tried to pay attention to the droning of these tutors. She felt suffocated by their odour of sweat mixed with chalk; it was the odour of quiet defeat.

  My mother began to pretend she had forgotten her tutorials, returning late, then acting surprised if she found a tutor waiting. The men soon complained to their employer, and one evening my mother arrived home to find my grandmother seated on the verandah, eyes large with rage and fear. She paused on the top step, frightened but also exalted at the possibility of freedom. My grandmother, with the swiftness of a snake, leapt from her chair, strode towards my mother, and grabbed her plait. “You think you can fool around and ruin your life? I’ll show you, yes I will.” She yanked the plait so hard that my mother yelled and clutched her head to keep the hair from ripping out of her scalp.

  Rosalind came running, but all she could do was stand there wringing her hands, afraid to do anything that might increase her mistress’s wrath. My grandmother dragged my mother by the hair to her bedroom, slapping her all the way. She shoved the curtain aside, pushed my mother inside, drew the seldom closed door shut, locked it and pocketed the key.

  “Let her starve in there tonight,” she panted to Rosalind. “She must be broken now, otherwise there is no hope. That girl is trying to make a laughingstock out of me. After all this praise from everyone, she wants to fail and humiliate me? No, no! Hema must succeed.”

  Groping for escape, my mother visited her father’s sister. These in-laws had been barely tolerated by my grandmother during her husband’s life, and since his death she had cut them off. The level of her animosity suggested to my mother that there was some dark knowledge to be gleaned from these relatives. Her aunt was glad to see Hema, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to my grandmother. “Yes-yes,” the aunt declared, “Daya is lucky our brother married her.” My mother had heard this many times before, but now she asked, “Why was my mother lucky?”

  Her aunt’s back arched with pleasure and she sat back in her chair, arms outstretched, a cat sunning on a warm rock.

  It seemed that when my grandmother was sixteen, an older cousin named Charles had come to stay in the family compound. He had grown up in England and was a very handsome man, the aunt said, speaking as if she actually knew him. Far too elegant and sophisticated for Daya. In the weeks that followed, Daya had fallen violently for this man. She had thrown herself at him, following him down to the beach at night, where he went to swim. He was a decent man, according to the aunt, a gentleman. He had ignored Daya’s declarations, gently advised her to be more prudent, told her with honesty that he did not love her back. But she persisted, and he, being a man after all, gave in. They were caught in a compromising position. News of this swept through the village, and Daya was shunned, even by her extended family. Whenever she had to visit town, people would turn away at the sight of her, and sometimes boys would throw pebbles, whistling lewdly and singing out, “Vesi, vesi.” According to the aunt, it had been an act of great charity on the part of her brother to marry such a fallen woman. An act of kindness that had never been appreciated by my grandmother, who now spat on the memory of her own husband by cutting out his family. By which the aunt meant they were entitled to some of the wealth he had left his wife.

  This story and what my mother knew of her own mother did not seem to match—and if she had really wanted the truth, or at least a version closer to the truth, she could have asked Rosalind. But the account was good enough for her, a first step towards freedom.

  What my mother had in mind as an escape, she could not yet tell. Perhaps she sensed already what she would do and it was so awful that she turned from it, unable to contemplate where such an action would leave her. So my mother continued to sit patiently through her tutorials every afternoon, and her tutors soon reported to my grandmother that Hema was both docile and quick at her work. The next three years passed in this way, and when she was eighteen my mother sat for her Higher School Certificate.

  She went to the first exam intending to do her very best. Yet once she was seated in the classroom and the exam bell had rung, she found herself observing a gecko crawling after a fly on the ceiling, the spinning, humming fans, the girls crouched over their desks, the invigilators standing in the doorways and murmuring to each other across the hall. All this created a hazy shimmer across my mother’s mind. She watched the minutes pass on the clock, then studied the other girls busily working around her, noting their school ties and the barrettes and ribbons in their hair, the styles of their shoes, their various tics and twitches of nervousness, how some girls clutched rosaries and other religio
us totems on their laps. At the halfway point, an invigilator made a tour of the room, and when she saw my mother’s blank examination book she nudged her and whispered, “Are you ill? Do you need a Disprin or something?”

  “No, no,” my mother whispered back. Seeing the woman’s concern, my mother began to answer the questions frantically. But too much time had passed, and when the bell rang she let out a burble of despair and kept working until, finally, the invigilator had to pry the booklet from her.

  As my mother left the classroom, she knew that even though she would not fail, she could not expect anything more than a credit. She felt frightened and cornered by this saboteur within, helpless in her grip. During each of the remaining three exams, her mind drifted from the questions and she would find herself, as before, looking about the room, observing the other students. Then a voice inside her would cry, “What are you doing! You are eating yourself!” and she would frantically try to answer a question, only to soon lose interest again.

  My mother, when she told me about those examinations, said she could not make sense of her actions, even to this day. It was as if some element of karma was at play, just like in those old Buddhist stories, some bad effect from a previous life realizing itself in this one. My mother laughed as she said this, yet I sensed she half believed it, as I, too, have come to half believe that we sometimes make choices inexplicable to us.

  The results came out a couple of months later. This time, my grandmother rose at dawn to wait. She and Rosalind spread the newspaper out under the dining-table lamp and craned over the columns. My mother watched as my grandmother ran her finger down, beginning at the top; watched the frown crease her forehead, the furrows growing deeper. After she had reached the end of the first page, my grandmother declared, “But there must be some mistake, they must have forgotten to print Hema’s name.” She glanced at Rosalind and then at her daughter. Perhaps she saw something in my mother’s face, because she quickly turned the page and ran a shaking finger down the columns that now listed only credits and passes. When she was halfway down she let out a throttled cry. My mother had received credits in physics and biology and a mere pass in botany and zoology. “But, how can this be, it’s not …” My grandmother stopped, seeing the mixture of emotions on her daughter’s face.